![]() "At this stage, this is a game of iterative engineering improvement, not conceptual breakthroughs," says Rigetti. "If you know how your hardware performs, you can use software tricks to make optimal use of that."ĭevices like those so far developed by Google, IBM and Rigetti are largely proof-of-principle machines that have now paved the way to years of hard slog to drive performance up. The kinds of qubits best suited to simulating the behavior of a new material, for example, might be different than the best ones for optimizing a financial portfolio.Īpplications of quantum computers might "need to be hardware-aware," Chow says. In other words, he explains, the hardware and software for quantum computers are more intimately connected than they are for classical computers, and users might benefit from knowing something of the underlying physics so they can choose the most appropriate hardware for their problem and tailor the algorithms accordingly. Despite IBM's present commitment to superconducting qubits, the company is keeping an eye on what trapped ions can do, and Chow says that they may be better suited to certain problems. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, agrees with Vazirani. IBM's Jerry Chow, manager of the Experimental Quantum Computing Team at the company's Thomas J. "It is also quite possible that it may not end up being an either/or situation," he adds - other technologies, such as trapped-ion computers, "have different strengths." Hardware-aware "There is a long road ahead, and it is too early to declare winners," says computer scientist Umesh Vazirani of the University of California at Berkeley. "There is vanishingly small chance that a fundamentally new qubit technology will enter the race and become competitive across all the fronts where quantum computing technology needs to work," says Chad Rigetti, CEO of Rigetti Computing in Berkeley, which is developing quantum computers for the commercial market - using superconducting qubits, naturally.īut that's not to say that some of the other candidate systems currently being considered for making qubits won't find a place. Right now, superconducting qubits are the technology of choice for quantum computers. In part that's because of the limitations of the hardware, especially the quantum bits that encode information. "We may feel confident that quantum technology will have a substantial impact on society in the decades ahead, but we cannot be nearly so confident about the commercial potential of quantum technology in the near term, say the next five to 10 years." "The 100-qubit quantum computer will not change the world right away," says John Preskill, a quantum information theorist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Now, having proved the doubters wrong, it must learn to manage expectations. ![]() Quantum computing once made exciting promises that few thought could materialize.
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